<p>Okay, so I'm currently taking a gap year and am re-evaluating what colleges I want to apply to. I did a terrible job at my college search last year, so I'm starting COMPLETELY from scratch.</p>
<p>Currently, I have about 89 colleges I am considering and obviously need to narrow this down, lol. Two of the main deciding factors will be size and surrounding area.</p>
<p>So basically I want a college that does not have the "everyone knows everyone" feel. On the other hand, I don't want to go to a state university. Discussion is preferable over taking a lecture with 1000 people.</p>
<p>I'm thinking maybe medium sized colleges, but what is a medium sized college? Would a college with 4000-6000 people be considered medium sized? What about one with 10000-15000?</p>
<p>Please tell me the following:
Small college = number of students
Medium college = number of students
Large college = number of students
Advantages and disadvantages of each. (Even though I'm wary about going to a small school, I might be willing to change my mind if I find there are advantages I don't know about.)</p>
<p>I go to a 4000 student university and definitely don’t have the feeling of “knowing everyone”. There are plenty of fresh faces each day, and to be honest the campus is packed with people all day. But the 4000 is considered really small compared to other universities.</p>
<p>Advantages of a small college population:
-small class sizes (15-30 students) average
-individual approach (professors are more helpful and easier to reach)
-community feel (you don’t feel lost)
-usually better lifestyle (dorms tend to be bigger and nicer)</p>
<p>Disadvantages of a small college population:
-less events,organization,clubs (there are enough to me, but there is more at bigger places)
-empty campus vibe during breaks or holidays (haven’t experienced it yet, but I was told it might get empty)</p>
<p>I honestly prefer a smaller campus body, because a huge college with over 30-40 000 students will make you hectic at times, the classes will be larger and thus rarely any individual approach. I have friends at universities with 50 000 students and they admit feeling like a number not a person.</p>
<p>Rather than paying attention to the total number of students at the university, pay attention to the size of your major department. Look for a department that’s large but not too large. You want to have a good variety of classes, but “few enough” students that the upper-level classes are small enough to get some personal attention from faculty.</p>
<p>Here are two concrete examples. I spent my undergraduate being a part-time student at two different institutions. One was a liberal arts college with 1,200 students. The other one was a private research university with 10,000 undergraduates (and another 10,000 graduate students). Here’s what my major departments looked like:</p>
<p>Liberal Arts College
Majors per year: ~30
Faculty: 8
Elective courses per semester: 2-4
Students per course: 5-50</p>
<p>Research University
Majors per year: ~50
Faculty: 45
Elective courses per semester: 15-20 + 10ish graduate classes open to undergrads
Students per course: 5-50 (in upper-level classes, up to 200 in introductory courses)</p>
<p>The larger university offered many more courses I was interested in, but the typical course wasn’t much larger. I got about the same amount of personal attention at both universities, though I got to interact with more professors at the larger university.</p>
<p>Don’t assume that all departments will be larger at a large university. The above research university has departments with as few as 3 professors. If you major in such a department, you’ll probably get very little input into the classes you want to take. You’ll just have to take whatever is being offered that term. (On the other hand, you’d probably get to know your professors quite well…)</p>
<p>I go to a medium-largeish university (15,000 undergrads) I think it strikes a good balance because class sizes are still relatively small (average is around 20-25), but there’s always new people to meet and a LOT going on. A large college is also more likely to have research and study abroad opportunities. And if you like sports, most Division I/top-level programs are at large schools.</p>
<p>The disadvantages come from professors not knowing you (again, not as much of a problem here but at other large schools) and a lot of times it feels too crowded as far as limited housing, limited parking, etc. It can also be hard to make friends at large schools, but a lot of them are now offering “Residential Learning Communities” or something on that line to mitigate this.</p>
That reminds me. There are two popular models for teaching introductory classes to a large number of students. One is to have professors teach large lectures, sometimes supplemented by smaller discussion sections or recitations which are held by a TA. The other option is to have graduate students teach several dozen sections with 30 students each. </p>
<p>If you have a strong preference for one over the other, find out how your universities teach intro classes.</p>
<p>I personally prefer the large intro lectures. On average professors with more teaching and work experience seem to give better lectures than graduate students (though there are certainly outliers). And it’s nice to be able to fade into the background in classes I don’t particularly care about. (Most intro classes I took for general education requirements. In subjects I cared about, I quickly got to smaller upper-level courses.)</p>
<p>Thanks to everyone who has posted so far! A lot of great info on here. Looking into the size of a major department hadn’t even occurred to me until now.</p>
<p>Basically, I consider small, medium, and large sized colleges as follows:
Small: up to 4000
Medium: between a little over 4000-15000
Large: more than 15000</p>
<p>Would you consider this to be an accurate measure?</p>
<p>Trying to classify universities as “small, medium and large” is missing out on too many subtle differences between the universities. A college with 500 students would be a very different experience from a college with 3,000 students, though both will be small compared to a university with 50,000 students. </p>
<p>It also makes a huge difference how those students are distributed. A university with 10,000 engineering majors will probably have much larger classes than a university with 10,000 students in 7 different colleges (engineering, architecture, arts and sciences, business, public policy, health sciences, agriculture). If a college within a larger university happens to have its own dorms too, you’d never notice that you are actually part of a larger university!</p>
<p>I’d suggest you keep track of the actual size of each university rather than trying to tag it as small, medium or large. There’s not a big difference between a university with 14,000 or 16,000 students. It would be unfortunate if you mentally associated the 14,000 student university with a 4,000 student university and the 16,000 student university with a 30,000 university because of how your rating system works.</p>
<p>I agree with b@r!um, the number of students in your major matters a lot more than the number of students total. For example, the Geology major at my school has around 70 undergraduates students with most classes under 30 students. However, our Psychology department has over 1000 undergraduate students with very few classes under 200 students. It hardly matters that the University has over 25,000 undergraduates once you get into major specific courses (yeah, Chem/Calc/etc will be large, but that’s mostly just for freshman year.)</p>